I presume that I was invited here because I did some work last year on mapping employability investment in Scotland. I am also a trustee of the Papworth Trust down south. We deliver the work programme, under contract to a prime provider.
There are two things that I want to bring into the discussion. First and foremost, having reached the end of the research process, I am convinced that Scotland needs to take a step towards identifying income, not jobs, as the objective of welfare for work. Jobs have never been more meaningless. When I first started doing this 25 years ago, when someone got a job it meant something; we could reliably assume that they would move from that job to a better job, but we cannot make that assumption any more. We know nothing about how well people stick work after six months, which is not a very long period. Would that make a difference on a CV to the next employer? I am not sure that it would, these days. Progression in the labour market is a real challenge, which goes alongside the lack of jobs that exists in the first place.
That said, the other thing that we learned from the review is that we do not know anything like as much as we thought we knew about programme performance. We cannot draw a blueprint for a programme. What should be the ratio of advisers to clients? We do not know. There is no evidence to tell us and there is nothing in the research about it. We have done work on that, but it was never published because the DWP said that it was not the kind of thing that we should look at. However, if you go to the front line of any project or programme, you will find that it is about the amount of time that an adviser can spend with an individual.
From all the evidence that I have looked at over 25 years, for whatever design you come up with, I could find you a very good and supportive evaluation and a very bad and destructive evaluation—for the very same design. It is not what you do, but the way that you do it, so culture, understanding and working with clients is essential. We do not, however, evaluate that and it is not in the research.
I visited our local office, which happens to be in Cambridge, where there are a lot of jobs. The Papworth Trust achieves double the rate for ESA flow clients—13 per cent of them sustain jobs. That is twice the national rate—and that is from the start of our contract to today. During the first two years of the contract—I do not mind sharing this with you—our trust lost money, but we now earn a surplus.
We do not do as well with the long-term ESA clients because there is not sufficient money and time in the work programme. We need more time. We have, for example, an allotment in one centre and cultural and arts-based activities in another. The real issue is not necessarily training people but giving them activities that socialise them and bring them up to standard.
One thing that I know from talking to front-line workers in our organisation about sanctions is that most of the clients whom they work with would get sanctioned if they were under the orbit of the DWP and Jobcentre Plus on a daily basis. It is not in our interests to do that—we bend over backwards to avoid it—but the DWP would not want to lose the ability to have someone sanctioned if they felt that that person was not pulling their weight.